Wereldwijde begrotingstekorten

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Obama should insist Congress pass a law that says that once unemployment
is back down below 5 percent, it would take a supermajority vote of
Congress to run deficits larger than 3 percent of GDP.

Lijkt me een heel goed idee ;)

Snoert de mond van heel veel conservatieve kringen, die eerst zelf voor
eneorme tekorten hebben gezorgd.

Iets voor onze regering?

Groet / Cees

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-06-18/the-gops-deficit-bluff/
If Republicans keep criticizing Obama for running up deficits, Clinton
Budget Office veteran Matt Miller says, he should tell them to put their
money where their mouth is: Pass a law.

With new polls showing voters are worried about soaring debt and
deficits—including 65 percent of independents, who’ve been known to flirt
with Perot-style movements in the past—and even former President George W.
Bush joining the GOP in attacking Obama’s spendthrift ways, it’s clear the
White House has to do something to take the steam out of this issue.

This is especially the case at a moment when even Obama’s prudent call for
deficit-neutral—that is, fully paid-for—health reform won’t take the sting
of any health plan’s $1 trillion 10-year price tag out of the headlines.

Trouble is, the president can’t do anything real about the deficit just
yet. For starters, even if the public doesn’t agree or understand, we
actually need to be running epic deficits for the next couple of years to
make sure the economy gets on track toward recovery. The point bears
repeating: In a situation in which business and consumers have slashed
spending after years of excess, only Uncle Sam has the wherewithal to
boost aggregate demand until we’re safely past the worst.

But beyond that, Obama can’t talk honestly about what the country will
inevitably have to do once we’re past the recession to put our fiscal
house in order. Why? Because even with (one hopes) new restraints on the
growth of health-care spending, any fix will involve higher taxes, and not
just on the “rich.”

For the White House to utter this inconvenient truth in a season when
Obama is already being tagged a socialist for his health-care and energy
plans would be to put the presidential head in a political noose. If
you’re Obama, far better to wait until some bipartisan commission you
empanel comes back with that grim news later in your first term.

So what’s a president in a fiscal pickle to do? The answer is a proposal
that lets Obama aggressively frame the debate in the right substantive
terms while not committing his administration to any problematic
specifics. Obama should insist Congress pass a law that says that once
unemployment is back down below 5 percent—recall we’re closing in on 10
percent today—it would take a supermajority (say, two-thirds) vote of
Congress to run deficits larger than 3 percent of GDP. That’s the number
most economists agree is a perfectly sustainable level—as compared to the
scary 10 or so percent we’re going to run this year.

Budget fetishists will scoff that this idea has all the appalling
hollowness of the old Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit-reduction targets from
the 1980s, which “committed” to deficit numbers that were then perennially
revised when they got too tough to meet. But my idea is actually a much
more substantive version of a hollow political gimmick, if you can
tolerate that paradox for a moment. Properly linking the goal of reducing
the deficit to the performance of the economy as reflected in the
unemployment rate would let Obama use every fiscal utterance to reinforce
the fact that we’re running up this red ink to create jobs and end the
recession he inherited.

When critics (rightly) say he’s offering no specifics on how to get the
deficit down, the president can reply that the important first step is to
commit the country to the right framework for fiscal sanity. Today White
House aides say 3 percent of GDP is, in fact, the president’s long-term
deficit goal, but there’s a big difference in our political and media
culture between just saying that (who cares?) and putting forward an
actual “proposal” that can be debated on cable and on the Sunday shows,
form the centerpiece of sober congressional hearings, be hailed and
assailed by the interest groups, and dissected on all sides by columnists.

It puts the administration on the front foot with a “plan” to restore
fiscal sanity once the economy has recovered. Toss in a bipartisan
commission to develop options to meet the 3 percent goal and you’ve got
more than enough illusion of action to quash GOP momentum on this issue
and satisfy the capital’s hunger for presidential initiative. Whether such
a measure actually becomes law is beside the point. That it can be chewed
over for months by the political establishment is.

To those who say I’m offering nothing more than a cynical ruse to push the
issue off while health care gets negotiated this summer, I’d say this:
What do you have against basic health coverage for every American? Plus,
as empty proposals go, this one—a version of which was first suggested to
me by Bob Litan, an old Office of Management and Budget hand now at the
Kauffman Foundation—has more virtues than most. It tells the world Obama
is serious about long-run fiscal sanity. It makes a concise public
argument for deferring deficit reduction until durable growth resumes.
And, done right, it’ll divert enough anti-Obama energy into a harmless
sideshow at a critical moment while some real work gets done.

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